The Painter

Blue and red lights were flashing. It was raining.
“What’s your name?”
There was a drop of water streaming down my glasses. Staring into it made the colors brighter, and somehow bigger. The flash of red looked like it would wrap around me, and swallow me whole.
“Ma’am,” called a voice. “Are you hurt ma’am?”
“No,” I said, gasping for air through the trickle of rain down my nose.
“Can you tell me what happened here?” A man stepped in front of me, blocking the flashing red, blue, and red again lights.
“Umm, well he,” I began. “He was just in line... I - I guess he had a big backpack, but it didn’t seem weird, you know? Like… it’s just a backpack you know? You know people have backpacks.”
I looked past the officer at the ambulance, framed by a singular deep gray cloud, that stretched as far as I could see. There was almost no sunlight, even though it had to be around 5.

“Can you tell me what happened next, ma’am?”
“I have a backpack. I have a black backpack. It’s kind of big, too.” I was staring at the ambulance. They were pulling a stretcher up the ramp. There was an old woman, with white hair and a yellow blouse laying flat on it. Her hand dangled over the edge, dripping, deep red. 
“Ma’am, can you tell me what happened?”
“Grandma,” I whispered, looking at her soft, wrinkled hand. “Grandma!” I cried. I tried to run to her but strong arms wrapped around me and held me back. 
I cried into my hands. They were stained. They were covered in blood. Grandma’s blood. “He shot gramma,” I whimpered.
I looked into the police officer’s eyes. “He shot my grandma.” 

???

My black dress hung over my shaking, goosebumped knees. The priest’s words drifted in and out of my ears. There was a sadness in the air, like the thick, looming mist on the morning before my grandmother was killed. I looked at the sky, and through the parting clouds I caught a glimpse of the sun, sinking on the horizon. The priest ended his closing prayer, and slowly those around me got out of their seats, walking to their cars at the bottom of the green grass hill. My mother stood next to me in her black skirt and sun hat, shaking hands with the priest. They were speaking to me, but I wasn’t listening. The priest held his hand out in front of me, as if I would take it.

I stood up, and I walked to my grandmother’s grave. I looked at it for a moment. “Loving wife, mother, grandmother.” I heard my mother apologizing for my behavior to the priest behind me.
“I am so, so sorry. Rene has been so very distant since it happened.”
“Oh dear, these things happen,” he responded.
“Yeah,” I thought. “These things do happen. One moment you’re at the bank with grandma and she’s checking out a young dude, and the next moment he shoots her.”
“Has she told you what happened that day?”
“No,” replied mother. “She won’t say or hear a word about it.”
“My, my…” the priest mused. “She must talk to someone. These things do take their toll, but I daresay she yet has a chance of normalcy,” he reasoned. He smiled, reassuringly, at my mother as if to say “Don’t you worry, dear sister.” She smiled back, right on cue. “Thank you, Father.”

I spat on the grass where my grandmother lay. She would understand.

“I have a card to give you - a close friend of mine, I think he can help Miss Rene.”

I heard those words and I felt control over my life slipping away. All I could do was run my fingers through the grass and watch the red sun sink below the illuminated clouds.

???

“Rene! It has been four months and you haven’t left your apartment, you hardly eat or sleep, you won’t talk to your friends - you won’t do nothin! Please. Please, can you please just go.”

My mother was begging me to go to the counselor her priest told her about. I don’t want to go. There is nothing anyone could say that would make my hurt go away. Nothing to lessen it.
“Please honey,” she said. “Will you just go once.”

“Okay,” I said, picturing her watery green eyes through the phone.

“Ah! That’s great darlin’! Let’s go now.”
“What!?? No way, not now! I don’t want to go now. I have things to do mom!”
“Honey, you need to go now. If you don’t go now - bless your heart - you never will. Just jump in the shower, and I will be there to pick you up when you get out.”
I shook my head and hung up the phone.

???

He sat directly across from me. Blue eyes, balding head, fading whiskers. George R. Andrews, PhD. The guy to make me “normal” again. He told me he would wait until I was ready to talk, because he “understands that it must be very hard for me talk about the trauma I went through.” 
“Well, sir, you’re gonna be waiting a long time.”
“I am very good at waiting,” he said with a smile, forming wrinkles under his eyes.
The couch I was sitting on was brown, leather, and cool to the touch. There was a matching brown coffee table in front of me. I looked at Andrews in the brown leather armchair across from me for a while, but it was uncomfortable because he would not take his eyes off mine. So instead I looked at the sand-colored, textured walls, with paintings of valleys and rivers, and various hanging wooden crosses. I was bored, so I reclined with my feet on the table to see if I could get a reaction out of him. He didn’t react. Then I stared at the clock until the hour session had gone by.
At last Dr. Andrews said, “Well that’s all the time we have for today.”
Not half way down the hall to the waiting room where my mother was waiting, I could hear her talking with some other mother. “Oh yes, she is such a sweet girl. She’s all grown up and she won’t let me help her - she’s always been stubborn, haha - but now she won’t even talk to me. Won’t talk to nobody. She just -” She looked up and saw me standing in the hallway. “Darlin’! How did it go my girl?”
Do you ever get that feeling, when you know you’re about to snap? That feeling that you’ve crossed the line of sanity, and you know you’re about to explode, but you don’t know if you’re going to break down in tears, or faint, or scream? Well, at this moment I was having one of those feelings. I probably would have yelled at my own mother. Told her how I don’t need this, told her how she could not possibly understand, how I could not possibly make her understand.
But I did not yell at my mother that day. George Andrews spoke for me. “We are making excellent progress, Mrs. Reynolds. I would love to see you, Rene, next week, at this time - if that works for you?”
“Fine.”

???

On my second visit I did not say a single word. On my third, nothing. My mother was ecstatic that I was going, and based on Dr. Andrews’ reports, ecstatic at how well I was doing. Everytime she asked me how it went, I would say it was confidential, and she would drop it. “Alright, alright darlin’. You do you, sweetpea.” And I would say “It’s boo boo mama, ‘you do you, boo boo.’” She would laugh at our little tradition and say, “Nah hon, I came up with it first. It’s sweet pea.” I liked our rides to my appointment every week. It was time I got to spend with my mom, when we weren’t fighting.

On my fourth visit I drove myself, because mother was busy. It was one of my first times driving since the incident. There were drops of rain sliding down my windows. A song came on the radio. “Calling your name in the midnight hour / Reaching for you from the endless dream / So many miles between us now / But you are always here with me.”

I turned it off. I heard sirens and I thought it was part of another song, that I hadn’t turned off the radio so I hit the power button again but that just made the song by Susie Suh turn back on. “Oh inside me / I find my way / Back to you / Back to you.”

I turned it off again and heard the sirens louder. I saw red lights in my rearview mirror. I pulled over. The sirens were so loud. I clapped my hands over my ears but I could still hear it so loud. I looked up and the ambulance seemed to be coming right at me - like it would crash into me! I took my seatbelt off and slid over the passenger seat and melted onto the wet, muddy grass outside my car. The sirens were so loud. I left my keys in the car and ran.

???

When I got to George’s office his door was wide open. I sat down on the brown leather couch, soaking wet, shaking, and sobbing. He came in and said something, then rushed back out. He came back and wrapped a blanket around me. He sat down to my right and put his left arm around my shoulders.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” he cooed. “You’re going to be okay. I know it hurts but it will pass. You’re going to be okay.”
“She liked him,” I confessed. “She liked him for me. We were snooping. He had a picture of a little girl in his wallet. It might not be important, but she was just so cute. She had these little glasses,” I held my hands to my face to show him. “We thought it was his daughter and gramma was like, ‘That’s a good man right th-the-th-there…” I gave in to waves of sobbing. Suddenly my clothes began to feel very cold, clinging to my skin.
“He was in line in front of us. He had these painting clothes on. She said ‘That’s a hardworkin’ man right there, Ren.’ Gramma liked him. She thought he was cute, too. We were on our way to my birthday dinner. She said I should invite him. I told her if she liked him so much she should ask him out. She laughed… for the last time.”
“He pulled the gun out and told everybody to get on the ground. But gramma couldn’t because she had a hip surgery when I was in seventh grade and she just can’t move like that. When he looked at her I should’ve got up. I should’ve stood in front of her. I just - I - I - I just didn’t think he would. I - I…. He  had that daughter, he seemed like a good guy. I didn’t think he would, but he did. He - he -heee…” I cried into the blanket. It was so nice and soft.

I wiped my eyes with it, and then I was worried I might have gotten mascara on it.
I opened my eyes, and almost couldn’t see through the tears at first. But then I saw. The blanket was red. A deep red. Like grandmother’s hand as it dangled over the stretcher. Like the hole in her head. I screamed. I jumped off the couch. I turned around to pull the blanket from my shoulders and I ran into the hall, still soaking, I slipped. I fell forward. I hit my head.

Where my cheek rested on the cold tile floor, I watched my blood stain it. I couldn’t move. My vision was clouded, tinted red. I heard the beating of Andrews feet, rushing out of the room, shouting for help.
The red grew darker, darker, until it swallowed me whole.